Health Care BS

The most succinct response to the inevitable fate of Maine’s universal health care boondoggle comes from Hillbilly White Trash, in an entry titled “I’ve sawed that board off three times and it’s still too short”:

The program failed, as it was guaranteed to fail just like all other top down “solutions” to problems are doomed to fail.

The entry’s hilarious title refers, of course, to the apparent inability of universal coverage advocates to handle basic arithmetic. No matter how many times they expand a program, it just won’t get cheaper. As Maine’s governor puts it:

I think when we first started, in terms of making estimates, we really were kind of groping in the dark.

The knee-jerk response to such statements is to write these people off as either very stupid or very crazy. However, a more sober examination of the facts suggests that there is method in their madness.

It’s difficult to avoid the impression that the advocates of programs like those of Maine and Massachusetts know perfectly well how much these programs will cost. The plan is to get people inured to government-run health care, and then to raise taxes. Maine’s governor avoids the “T” word, of course, preferring more euphemistic language:

We’ve got a reform package that takes Dirigo to the next level … It takes the training wheels off.

The citizens of Maine had better keep their hands on their wallets.

UPDATE:

A lot of blogs picked this up more or less simultaneously, and a couple focused on features of the story even more illustrative of Maine’s folly than the passages I have quoted above. Kevin, MD highlights the fact that they have learned precisely the wrong lesson from this mess. They think the problem is that healthy people haven’t been forced into the program:

There are not enough enrollees, especially healthy people unlikelty to use many benefits.

Gruntdoc expresses relief that these programs are being experimented with at the state rather than the federal level, but the above suggests that our political class is utterly impervious to objective data. I have no confidence that snafus like Maine will prevent our masters in Washington from imposing a similarly flawed system.

For our “leaders” it’s not about efficiency or even health care. It’s about power and money.